Burden of illness imposed by severe sepsis in Switzerland

Increasing pressure on health care budgets worldwide emphasizes the need to address eco-nomic implications of new services and therapies. However, economic studies are still rarely found. Due to differences in healthcare systems economic questions need to be dealt with on a country-by-country basis. These differences prevent an easy application and adaptation of foreign findings to the particular country of interest. Sepsis is one of the disease areas that lately moved into medical so-ciety’s focus because of its high mortality rate and the ongoing search for effective drug therapies. This general interest was recently increased by the publication of the PROWESS trial [1], which showed improved survival of severe sepsis patient